This week, The Music Treasury is presenting the distinguished tenor Nicolai Gedda, who had an exceptionally long career throughout the 20th Century.
Dr. Gary Lemco hosts the show, which can be heard from its station KZSU in the Bay Area between 19:00 to 21:00 PDT; it can also be heard on its streaming simulcast at kzsu.stanford.edu.
Nicolai Gedda, Tenor
Nicolai Gedda (1925-2017), the Swedish singer who rose from an impoverished childhood and a youthful career as a bank clerk to become one of the most celebrated tenors of the 20th century, died of a heart attack on Jan. 8 in Tolochenaz, Switzerland. He was 91.
Widely admired for his sensitive musicianship, masterly tonal control and impeccable diction in a spate of European languages, Mr. Gedda possessed a lyric tenor voice that shimmered like silver but was no less warm for that.
He was one of the most versatile, and professionally long-lived, tenors of his era, with many dozens of roles to his name in a career that lasted until he was well into his 70s — a good two decades past a classical singer’s customary retirement age.
Mr. Gedda was ubiquitous on recordings and in the world’s foremost opera houses and concert halls, including La Scala in Milan and Covent Garden in London.
The fluid lightness of Mr. Gedda’s voice made him especially well suited to the French repertoire: His roles included Des Grieux in Massenet’s “Manon,” Hoffmann in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” Roméo in Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette” and the title role in Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini.”
Among his Italian roles were Nemorino in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore,” Ernesto in his “Don Pasquale” and Edgardo in his “Lucia di Lammermoor,” as well as the Duke of Mantua in “Rigoletto,” Alfredo in “La Traviata” and Riccardo in “Un Ballo in Maschera,” all by Verdi.
But the role for which he was very likely most famous was Russian: Lensky, the young poet in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” Reviewing Mr. Gedda in a performance of “Onegin” with the Boston Symphony in 1976, Richard Dyer wrote in The Boston Globe: “The tenor’s voicing of Lensky’s aria — an ideal union of responsiveness to word and musical line, a demonstration of vocal and technical mastery and varied and beautiful tone, and an expression of wise and generous human feeling — was a classic demonstration of why, for some of us at least, operatic singing is the highest achievement of human art.”
Mr. Gedda’s prowess in a Russian opera is perhaps unsurprising in light of the fact that Russian, along with Swedish, was his native language: He was abandoned as a child by one Russian father and reared by another.
The permutations of Mr. Gedda’s name over time attest to the volatile nature of his childhood: According to his memoir, “Nicolai Gedda: My Life & Art,” published in English in 1999, he was born in Stockholm on July 11, 1925. The son of an unwed teenage waitress, Clary Linnea Lindstrom, and an unemployed father of Russian-Swedish parentage, Nikolai Gädda, he was christened Harry Gustaf Nikolai Gädda.
His parents abandoned him at birth and planned to consign him to an orphanage. But when he was six days old, his father’s sister, Olga Gädda, intervened, determined to rear him as her own. A few years later, Olga married Michail Ustinoff, a Russian-born singer, and the child became known as Nikolai Ustinoff.
Swedish authorities deemed the couple too poor to adopt him. “Nevertheless,” Mr. Gedda wrote in his memoir, “they had the courage to keep me illegally.”
But the situation was far from idyllic. At the slightest infraction, Mr. Gedda wrote, his foster father would beat him with “a narrow Cossack belt that had once belonged to his uniform.” Mr. Gedda, who grew up speaking Russian and Swedish, believed for years that the Ustinoffs were his biological parents. It was not until he was an older teenager that he was told the circumstances of his birth.
Nicolai Gedda, Tenor
In 1929, when Michail Ustinoff became the choirmaster of a Russian Orthodox Church in Leipzig, the family moved there, and young Nikolai soon acquired German. His first voice lessons were with his foster father, and by the time he was 5, he was singing and playing the piano with facility. In 1934, after the rise of Hitler, the family left Germany and returned to Stockholm. He lived there with his foster parents until he was in his early 20s, sleeping in a tiny alcove off the kitchen of their modest apartment.
After finishing high school, Mr. Gedda took a job as a bank clerk in Stockholm, earning extra money as a wedding singer.
Through a customer at the bank, he was introduced to the tenor Carl Martin Ohman, who had been a mentor of the renowned Swedish tenor Jussi Björling. Mr. Gedda began lessons with Mr. Ohman and later studied at what is now the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.
He made his operatic debut at 26, as the coachman Chapelou in “Le Postillon de Lonjumeau,” by Adolphe Adam, with the Royal Swedish Opera. His performance — notably the aria “Mes amis, écoutez l’histoire,” with its stratospheric high D, was rapturously received. Soon afterward, he sang for Walter Legge, the influential classical record producer at EMI.
On hearing him, Mr. Legge sent telegrams to the conductor Herbert von Karajan and Antonio Ghiringhelli, who oversaw La Scala. “Just heard the greatest Mozart singer in my life,” his wires read. “His name is Nicolai Gedda.” From then on, Mr. Gedda never wanted for work. He made his La Scala debut as Don Ottavio in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” conducted by Mr. Karajan, in 1953. The next year he sang Faust at the Paris Opera and the Duke of Mantua at Covent Garden.
Mr. Gedda made his United States debut in 1957, singing Faust with the Pittsburgh Opera. Reviewing his Met debut, in that role later that year, Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times:
“His carriage is tall and straight and his movement buoyant. It is credible that he will attract Marguerite. Even more impressive than his appearance is the intelligence of his singing.”
Mr. Gedda’s other Met roles over the years included Don Ottavio, Tamino in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” Admète in Gluck’s “Alceste,” Grigory in Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” and Pinkerton in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” With the Met, he also sang Anatol in the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa,” conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos, in 1958, and Kodanda in the U. S. premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “The Last Savage,” under Thomas Schippers. Over a quarter-century, he sang 367 performances with the Metropolitan Opera, from his debut in the title role of Gounod’s “Faust” in 1957 to his final performance, as Alfredo in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” in 1983. [Adapted from the New York Times, Feb. 10, 2017 Obituary for Nicolai Gedda]
Program List:
Glinka: 3 Songs from the 1968 Philharmonic Hall Recital
Faure: Poeme d’un jour, Op. 21 (w/A. Ciccolini)
Respighi: Notte; Stornallatrice (w/G. Moore)
Nicolai: “Hoerch, die Lerche singt” from The Merry Wives of Windsor (w/R. Heger)
Bach: Cantata No. 189 “Meine Seele ruemt und preist (w/H-M. Linde)
Mozart: Don Giovanni, K. 527 “”Dalla sua pace”; “Il mio tesoro” (w/A. Cluytens)
3 Traditional Russian folk songs:
Evening Bells; Troika; Weeping Willow’s Dream; Caucasian Melody (w/Russian Men’s Chorus)
Bizet: “Au font du tempe saint” from Les Pecheurs de perles (w/Ernest Blanc; G. Pretre)
Puccini: Madame Butterfly: “Bimba degli occhi pieni di malia” (w/M. Callas; Karajan)
J. Strauss: Eine Nacht in Venedig: Herzog’s entrance to end of Act I (w/O. Ackermann)
Berlioz: Sanctus from Requiem, Op. 5 (w/D. Mitropoulos)
